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Rodney McMillian’s cyclorama of displacement at SFMOMA

Charles DesmaraisApril 29, 2019Updated: May 7, 2019, 11:18 am

Rodney McMillian’s “In This Land” (2019) is an installation commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo: SFMOMA

Los Angeles artist Rodney McMillian’s “In This Land,” an installation commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its New Work series, is of a scale and ambition that few artists would attempt.

It centers on a grand, quasi-abstract landscape, a violent rift suggesting blood and bile under a heavy sky. A pair of squawky public address speakers mounted on tripods plays a recording of the artist reciting and singing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” teasing from it all the anger of the song’s embittered veteran, and the lyrics we might choose not to hear.

There’s another song, “Home” from “The Wiz,” stripped of its sentiment in the context of a matter-of-fact interview with a homeless advocate.

The three-walled gallery used at SFMOMA for New Work has an annoying limitation, with an open public passageway at one end. That is a handicap for McMillian’s 88-foot-long, floor-to-ceiling mural, which wants to immerse its viewer fully, like the Civil War cycloramas in Atlanta and Gettysburg it wrenchingly recalls.

A detail of Rodney McMillian’s “In This Land” (2019), a grand, quasi-abstract landscape. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer